Author Archives: pav

This is the part I wrote first. All the other parts were written to justify this coldhearted analysis on what should be the role of management in Scrum. I was convinced that there had to be something more for management to do than “support the team and get out of the way.” Over the years, […]

Pavley.com presents, the penultimate episode of ITSAM! Starring the algorithms of Scrum. The computational thinking that makes it possible to do “twice the work in half the time.” Last episode, part 4, starred the story point as a data structure of enumerated values and its function as a signal of complexity. Story points are expressed as […]

Our story so far: in part 3 I described the Scrum team as a data structure—an undirected graph. I tried to show how the properties of an undirected graph predict how a Scrum team behaves and how it can be optimized for productive behavior. Part of that optimization is keeping teams small, eliminating hubs, and […]

Ah, I can see from those weary, sleepy eyes, that like me, you are obsessed with improving your team’s WIP (work in progress). Stick with me and we’ll get to the bottom of the productivity conundrum with the power of our computational thinking! In part two, I listed the three data structures and four algorithms […]

Welcome back! In part one, I expressed my dismay that Scrum was conceived with no formal role for management, especially not Engineering Management. I also claimed that Scrum is Agile, that Scrum is not dead, and that Scrum was created long before the hyperconnected Internet we now inhabit came into being. I found that Jeff […]

I just finished reading Scrum: the Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff and JJ Sutherland . Jeff Sutherland co-created Scrum in the 90s. JJ Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc and works closely with his father. Prior to this, I’ve read the big thick technical tomes on Scrum, […]

Introduction Big O is all about saving time and saving space, two resources that computer algorithms consume to do repetitive jobs (like sorting strings, calculating sums, or finding primes in haystacks). Big O analysis is required when data points grow very numerous. If you need to sort thousands, millions, billions, or trillions of data points […]

Hey! Who remembers that comic book manger app I was writing a few months ago? Not me! Actually I didn’t forget about Book Binder–I just smacked into my own limitations. I had to take a break and do a bunch of reading, learning, and experimenting. And now I’m back. Look at a what I did… […]

I hear that many of the applicants we interview still have a hard time with FizzBuzz and other simple examples of looping, testing, and printing integers. This was true in 2007 when Coding Horror wrote this a famous blog post on Fizz Buzz, true in 2010 when DanSignerman famously asked StackOverflow about it, and true […]